The maternity department at Shaare Zedek Medical Center is the busiest in Israel, handling more than 22,000 births every year at its main and satellite hospitals in Jerusalem.

Yet even here, the arrival of seven pairs of twins – that’s 14 babies, all doing well – in a single 24-hour period between July 12 and 13 was a noteworthy event.

For those with a more spiritual bent it’s also a lucky number. In numerology, 14 represents new beginnings and positive change.

A hospital spokesman told ISRAEL21c that this represents a new record for the medical center. “In recent recorded memory, the previous high was five [sets of twins in one day],” he said.

The birth mothers included Jewish and Arab women from Jerusalem and beyond.

One of the moms, Ma’ayan Luzon Peretz, said she’d come “from afar” to deliver her “two sweeties” because she’d had a previous positive experience giving birth at Shaare Zedek. 

She arrived for the big occasion in style, with the nails of one hand polished blue and the nails of the other pink, in honor of the son and daughter she was soon to deliver with her husband at her side.

Another mother told reporters that she had waited 12 years for her first child, and now, three years later, was excited to add a pair of twins to the family she and her husband had yearned for so long to build.

Shaare Zedek has six maternity wards in all: four at the main Shaare Zedek Medical Center campus in Beit HaKerem and another two at downtown Bikur Cholim Hospital, a dedicated maternity hospital. 

In June 2022, ISRAEL21c reported that identical twins Yael Yishai and Avital Segel gave birth to baby boys on the same day at Shaarei Zedek.

The medical center recently opened a boutique maternity hotel where new mothers can spend a few pampering days with their new baby after being discharged from the hospital.

Throughout Israel, 178,000 babies were born in 2022 according to the Central Bureau of Statistics.